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TL;DR: IMHO 3 point bed leveling is so much better than 4 point bed leveling and auto bed leveling.

So the PiPlay Portable Kickstarter has ended, and we have been doing tons of fulfillment these past few weeks. One of the add-ons was originally a laser cut case, but realistically, it didn’t work well.

My friend Nick from P3DCreations was able to design us an awesome 3D printable case at the last minute, and the demand for it was high. Higher than I could reasonably print on my current printers. 3D printing is a lot slower than laser cutting, so I needed to add a new printer to my “print farm”.

The Monoprice Maker Ultimate is a rebrand of the Wanhao D6 (or Duplicator 6) which itself is a mix of an Ultimaker and a Zortrax M200. I have been printing with it non stop for the past 2 weeks and it has been a workhorse. I love this printer. It has made 3D printing fun for me again. Pro Tip: Wait for it to go on sale, as I got mine for $550 shipped.

Leveling Up

The difference comes from how you level the bed. The most common bed is a piece of aluminum with 4 screws attached at each corner. As you screw down each corner, you are bending the bed, trying to make it flat enough for your print to adhere correctly at all points. Realistically you end up warping the bed. Every time you get one point leveled, you’ve just unleveled the opposite point.

Auto bed leveling uses a probe and triggers when it detects the bed. It does this at multiple points on the bed at the beginning of each print to determine the shape and warpness of the bed, and then tries to correct the skew as it prints. When it works it’s amazing, but if it doesn’t you risk damaging your bed, hotend, and printer components. Also, depending on the controller board and software determines how well the software can compensate.

On the Maker Ultimate (and numerous other printers) the bed is leveled by 3 screws. One in the front and 2 in the back. Doing this makes a plane and makes leveling a quick affair that just works and tends to stay in place for longer.

I also like that the bed is stationary and just moves on the Z axis, rather than i3 type 3d printers that moves the bed on the Y axis. I’m not a fan of how much motion is generated when moving the bed like that. I’ve had failures due to the wobble of the bed causing a print to fall off.

There are many great i3 printers, and a well tuned printer will make good prints on any machine, but man, I’m so pleased with this Monoprice Maker Ultimate.

I’m sorry about the lack of posts. Being a Dad is the most amazing time consuming adventure I have ever been on! I am currently on paternity leave, and of course I thought I would have tons of down time to post and update….all the parents are collectively shaking their head.

This weekend is Star Wars Celebrations! While I’m not able to go, for the past week I’ve been helping Free Play Florida finish their 10 foot Star Wars arcade cabinet for the convention. This thing is awesome! And MASSIVE!

This post is made possible because ELTechs has provided me with an early version of Exagear Desktop 2.0. This is commercial software that was provided to me free of charge.

One of my game room goals has been to have a full sized Fix It Felix Jr. arcade cabinet, and now that I can run the game on the Raspberry Pi, I’m one step closer!

The desktop version of Fix-It Felix Jr. has been notoriously hard to find. It has been released as a flash game, an Apple iOS app, Android app, and even a homebrew Sega Genesis/MegaDrive ROM, but never as a stand alone application.

The version that ran at Disney Quest, and which was on tour at some of the themeparks, was never officially released.

Recently though, it got released to the internet, and I quickly grabbed it and ran it through a hex editor to see what makes it tick.

It uses a 3rd party framework called FOCAL, which powers many small games on desktop and mobile, made by Code Mystics. I was excited to finally have the software, but I wasn’t thrilled that I needed a Windows machine to run it.

Enter ExaGear Desktop. An inexpensive (~$27) x86 emulator with OpenGL support for the Raspberry Pi. It’s acts more as a virtual machine, running an x86 distro of Debian (or Ubuntu) inside a shell on top of Raspbian.

To get it working once you have purchased Exagear:

In a fresh install of Raspbian, you need to make sure to run sudo raspi-config and enable FULL Open GL support. After that, install ExaGear ( sudo ./install_exagear.sh ), and then double click on the exagear icon on the desktop to bring up the shell. Run sudo apt-get install wine, then run wine FixItFelixJr.exe .

Wine should start up and asks to install some dependencies. And then the moment of truth, the Fix It Felix Jr. window should pop up, and the game will be fully playable!

To those who may not have guessed, I am not a big Trump supporter. I am a Bernie Sanders fan. I am an independent progressive who thinks science and technology are the way forward.

This week the Republicans tried to bring their Trumpcare bill to the House which would repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act (ObamaCare), and… they failed. One thing I noticed in the GOPs marketing is that they kept touting this new site called readthebill.gop. It’s a slick site, showing off their failed bill and how great it will be, but what really intrigued me was the top level domain: .gop.

I wanted to know more about this. My google-fu led me to www.join.gop which incredibly enough allows you to search and register for domain names under the GOP brand. WTF?!

OK, naturally I tried donaldtrump.gop and various others, but they were all unavailable. But of course, the GOP must have disabled anything that says anything negative about themselves….right?

Well here we go. And it’s only $20.16. Surely they wont let it through.

Ok, so I bought it, but surely someone must confirm these orders manually right?